INSTRUMENTATION • ELECTRONICS
F LIQUID R
ising costs from inflation and increased focus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions make product loss management more important
than ever in dairy plants. One major reason these losses occur is because timings or other process parameters are set incorrectly, causing a lot of valuable dairy product to be unnecessarily washed out together with the wastewater. Collo’s liquid fingerprint technology addresses this problem by detecting any type of liquid in the pipes in real-time, offering an easy way to optimise production and cut product losses. Te rising costs of raw milk, electricity and other expenses are driving dairy plants to put more focus on reducing milk loss. Te cost of raw milk risen by 64% in two years in the EU region, and in some countries significantly more. With thin profit margins, it is a strategic imperative for many plants to minimise product loss. At the same time, there is global pressure to reduce the CO2
footprint of dairy
production, and here milk loss at the plant plays a key role.
Te scale of the problem is huge. Considering that the EU alone had more than 12.000 milk processing and
The clever way to stop milk losses in dairy plants
INGERPRINT SOLUTION
production sites handling over 161 million tons of raw milk in 2021, significant volumes of milk could be saved, translating into greatly reduced carbon footprints for dairies across the EU by prioritising reductions in production losses. “But to be able to minimise wasting
valuable milk products, it is essential to know where in the process the leak happens,” says Mikko Tielinen at ColloidTek. “With conventional methods it is hard to meet that goal, which often results in milk products being unnecessarily flushed out with the wastewater. When a leakage then shows in the form of excess organic waste in the effluent, it is extremely difficult to determine where it is coming from.”
MILLIONS OF EUROS DOWN THE DRAIN For a typical dairy plant with an intake of around 250 million litres of milk per year, a loss of just 1% of the raw material corresponds to literally throwing about one million euros down the drain. Tielinen points out that current solutions are insufficient for addressing the problem. Flow rate timing is very
inaccurate, and traditional sensors are unreliable and imprecise, with fouling and creep being major issues. As several types of traditional sensors are needed to detect different types of liquids, such as whey, cream, and cleaning chemicals, the optimisation systems become complicated and expensive to manage. “Our solution, on the other hand, offers an easy and very accurate way to detect where exactly in the process the leakage is,” Tielinen says. “It measures the exact real-time liquid fingerprint at any desired point in the process with a single EMF- sensor. Combined with machine learning, our solution ensures that the process stays optimised and easily monitored through our cloud solution.”
The ColloidTek solution 44
www.engineerlive.com
ADDRESSES PROBLEMS AT THE SOURCE Usually, product losses in the process are noticed when there is an excess of organic material in the effluent. Tis can also be a sign of problems in the production, however, measuring just the effluent does
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